Many in Boston Feel Relief as Olympic Bid Ends, but Others See a Stagnant City

BOSTON — Carol Oldham was enjoying lunch with a friend on a park bench in Boston Common on Tuesday, one day after the United States Olympic Committee pulled the plug on the city’s bid to host the 2024 Summer Games.

The Olympic organizers had somewhat incongruously envisioned transforming the Common, the oldest urban park in the country, into the site for beach volleyball, with a temporary 16,000-seat stadium and tons of sand strewed across the sloping greenery.

Ms. Oldham, 43, executive director of a nonprofit group, was still slightly aghast at the prospect. “How many of these beautiful old trees would they have had to chop down?” she asked, shaded by majestic oaks and maples. “And tons of sand?”

Across Boston, residents were still processing the past half-year of tumultuous, all-consuming debate over whether Boston should have gone for the gold. The naysayers, whom Mayor Martin J. Walsh dismissed as “10 people on Twitter,” had won out: The bid collapsed Monday after Mayor Walsh refused to guarantee that taxpayers would cover cost overruns, and the U.S.O.C. said public support here was too anemic for Boston to prevail over other cities, including Paris and Rome.

The decision left Bostonians reflecting on whether the city was too small-minded and stodgy to achieve anything big or too smart to be taken in by developers promising Olympic riches.

Ms. Oldham, for one, said she was proud that Boston had spurned the Games, and not just because the idea of beach volleyball on the Common was tone-deaf.

“I think it says really good things about Boston,” she said. “I’m really proud of us for saying no and not saying, ‘Whatever your terms are we’ll accept them.’ Taxpayers end up bearing a huge burden, and you end up with a lot of infrastructure that you don’t use again.”

Hers seemed to be the prevailing view, if the poll numbers were any guide. When the ax fell, many more people still opposed hosting the Olympics than supported it.

“I think Boston is perfect as it is,” said George Rodriguez, 48, an electrician, who was taking a break in the Common. “The Olympics would have left a big bill behind for the taxpayers.”

He also thought that Los Angeles, which may try to win the bid in Boston’s place, would be a better choice. “Here, we shine in our own way,” he said. “We have our history, our marathon. In California, they like to showboat.”

But for Thomas J. Whalen, a political historian at Boston University, the outcome was frustrating. The bid withdrawal short-circuited a discussion about a master plan for Boston’s future, he said, and has shown the city to be “a parochial backwater.”

“Sometimes I just want to pull my hair out,” he added. “It’s probably easier to get to Pluto and back than have a master development plan for Boston.”

He said the Olympics could have served as a catalyst to move Boston ahead. But he faulted the private group that organized the bid as “completely incompetent” for making blunder after blunder, including developing its plans in secret, misrepresenting them to the public, hiring former Gov. Deval Patrick at $7,500 a day (he later said he would work free), and failing to show how the Olympics could help restore the region’s crippled mass transit system, one of its most pressing problems.

The chief opposition group, No Boston Olympics, was careful all along to avoid appearing parochial, and its statement after the bid fell apart reflected how it had straddled the line. “We are a city with an important past and a bright future,” the group said. “We got that way by thinking big, but also thinking smart.”

Dueling columnists at The Boston Globe captured the varying moods over the outcome. Joan Vennochi praised the organizers of No Boston Olympics and called them heroes in the best Revolutionary tradition. “Naysayers, after all, helped make Boston the city it is,” she wrote. “They said no to King George III — who also underestimated the enemy — and yes to democracy.”

“There’s a way to spin this that should make people feel good, and it goes like this: We don’t do track meets here, we cure cancer,” she wrote. But that view reflected poorly on the city, she said. “To the world, Boston is still the same old, same old — a difficult place to get anything done, a place where we’re happy as we are.”

Mr. Whalen, the professor, agreed that the city’s rejection of the Olympics had sent out a new, discouraging message: “ ‘The time of big dreams, big accomplishments, is over,’ ” he said. “ ‘Think small,’ that’s the mantra for Massachusetts. ‘Limit your dreams.’ ”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A9 of the New York edition with the headline: Many in Boston Feel Relief as Olympic Bid Ends, but Others See a Stagnant City. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe